Ek thi daayan: Fear factor please

Ek thi daayan

Starring: Emraan Hashmi, Huma Qureshi, Konkona Sen, Kalki Koechlin

Rated: 5/10

So Ektaji Kapoorji! There was a lot of paranormal activity going through in your head all these weeks, months — all those pretaatmas coming together to get their man (readpishaach) back into their realm, all those sexy choties doing a snake dance, all those dilated pupils trying to drown you in a black pool, all those child sacrificing activities ordered to spook you out, all those dark, haunted alleys, those hells underneath the highrises and, of course, that dysfunctional lift that takes you all the way down to God only knows where!

Yes Ektaji, you do such kitsch in style so all the cinematography is faultless. The packaging, the muted lighting, the cobwebs and the spooky flat are apt too. So is the lizard, Ektaji and, yes, you do wonders with its twitter and its tail!

But then, where was the soul? Yes, we know your characters in this one were not supposed to have one but still — perhaps the story could do with one? For most part, you kept the quotient a little too tight on fear, hyping instead on suspense, and we wonder why. We wonder because your daayans were just too good — all so intense, frightening, sexy and real. Konkana was brilliant with her smile; Huma Qureshi a perfect fit with her winning ways, her bindaas attitude and her oh-so-real portrayal of a not so aam aadmi’s wife who has sightings of his dead sister and women from a different world. Kalki, with her wider than usual smile, looked foreign enough to have justified her journey all the way from New York, though you wished she was as arresting all through as she was with Yaaram...

And, to top it all, you also had a jadugar in Emraan Hashmi just if anything were to go wrong with all these other-world characters. So why, oh why, the sexiest thing in your film was the curling, hurling plait and not the story by a long shot?

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 21 April, 2013